


Hurdle

by intrepidem



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Asphyxiation, Dark, Exorcised Josh, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, One Shot, POV Second Person, exorJosh, not sexual though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 02:24:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10584471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrepidem/pseuds/intrepidem
Summary: This was something Chris had to hurdle.





	

**Author's Note:**

> writing this gave me anxiety. enjoy!

Dark grey walls are illuminated by dim lamps of different shapes and forms all strewn across Josh's room, each one reflecting yellow and orange and some pink off of the painted interior and movie posters hanging about. You notice this as you scan with your eyes around. Looking over to your right, you see him, enraptured in the movie playing on your laptop and even though he has his own flat screen television, you prefer this way because you guys can both lay on his pillow-littered king sized loft bed comfortably, side by side, like you're used to.

The blue from your laptop is an atmospheric change. You observe the light glow on his face and the brightness glinting in his eyes. He seems so enraptured. The movie playing is Robert Wiene's _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_ , and that makes sense because it's his favorite and that's why he chose it for his turn on movie night. He'd probably be upset to know you aren't paying very much attention, but you doubt he'll deign to tear his eyes away in order to notice you haven't been looking at the screen.

Maybe you were wrong, though, because he's looking at you now, facing you with two clear, unscarred cheeks and you look away because he noticed you staring and you have nothing to explain yourself with. You only hear a part of what he says past the hot smokescreen of embarrassment.

" _. . . Cochise. I mean, I know I'm smokin' hot, but damn. What . . ._ "

You look back up slowly and by the expectant look on his face, you realize he asked you a question.

" _Huh?_ " You hear yourself say dumbly.

He bites his not-mangled lip and uses a quick finger to tap the space bar, eliminating the background noise and pausing the movie. Now you can hear it astoundingly clear: shifting as he adjusts himself on the covers, turning his body towards you. Everything about this minuscule movement feels very much not how it's supposed to, and you're responsible for it in full.

" _Hey, you all good?_ " He sounds uncharacteristically concerned, and that emotion worries his brow, making it furrow into his forehead.

The right side of his face is suffering from shadow, and now your eyes have drifted to the wall nearest to your heads. There plays your shadows. You take note of the outline of his side-profile made of all consuming darkness against crisp blue edges. You see your own profile as well, after traveling through a lot of blue dead space in between them.

The light from your laptop is making a puppet show and it's fascinating for some strange and liberating reason. You silently appreciate the nice purse of a familiar looking set of lips made out against the dark impression on the wall, and wonder what it would be like to close that space between the two dimensional phantoms who no longer have a face or a name.

The anonymity and simplicity of shapes lacking identity is what possesses you to move your shape forward. The shape of it's hand grasps the smooth left cheek of the figure across from it, pulling it and pushing up until those shadows meet but you suddenly aren't worried about the shadows anymore, not even a little bit.

All you're worried about is the feeling of warmth and suffocation. You comprehend what you're doing far too late because it's done; a soft smack announces the end of two pairs of lips meeting for the first time ever. Your eyes had closed themselves but now they decide to flutter open and you can see him again, the real him. Your pale hand is still grasping gently along his jaw. It's weird to see it there of all places until you put all the pieces together that there was never any anonymity at all. No identity-less phantoms under your will. It's time to own up. You stop looking at your own hand and look into his face instead.

He's just staring with those grey-green eyes he sports, glimmering with something never before seen, and alongside that he seems shocked. You can tell because of his silence, a rare occurrence in your experience. Neither of you had ever thought about crossing this boundary, no matter how close you had come to it with mindless flirts and fleeting fantasies. He's acting like someone just poured ice water on him without warning.

More than anything else, though, he seems kind of elated. You can tell _that_ because he gets this strange quirk in his lips reminiscent of all the times you let him win at Smash Bros or asked about the film techniques used by his favorite auteur directors.

In the end, that's what makes you do it again, meeting his lips in real time, and then again and again and again. After a while you feel him reciprocate, gentle shaking hands that don't seem anything like Josh grasping one of your shoulders and your bicep. You feel a smile against your lips, sweet and innocent, but it gets wiped away quickly by your incessant mouth, becoming less gentle by the second and more fervent by the hour because that's what it feels like, like hours before you finally start to get on top on him, kissing and kissing and kissing without pause.

You don't even think about pulling away while you haphazardly climb over the laptop between the two of you, using peripheral sight and otherwise blind touch to navigate. When you straddle his waist it's like a puzzle has just been finished, revealing a picture that lets you know just how well you fit together. His hands run through your hair, pulling you down for more and it's perfect.

Your hands feel like they have a mind of their own, inspired by this new development and taken over by somethings bigger than yourself. They trace up his flank and along his chest, around his shoulders, and your touch seems to be making him react, tiny shivers gracing your fingertips through his flesh. You can also feel his heartbeat thumping when your hands reach his throat, made unsteady by circumstance. It's so tender for you to feel him alive beneath you, and for the first time in what feels like a lifetime you decide to break the kiss.

You lift yourself up to look at him, his face blissed out and his eyes closed and he's more beautiful than you've ever seen him like this, completely under your spell. Power rushes over you like a wave, urging the hands lining Josh's throat to close a little, and now you've got him in your grip.

Distantly, you feel his larynx drop as he swallows, and his brows knit in confusion while his eyes flutter open to look up at you. An unsure smirk pulls onto his lips.

" _Little kinky for the first date._ " He whispers with an almost laugh, but those pale, pale hands just tighten their grip, and you witness his face change.

Fear has trickled onto his features, not completely won over but definitely there on his face. He must be thinking something distinct with the way he starts to look at you. 

Personally, you don't know what to think, but the hands must be thinking something very distinct with the way they hold, unrelenting, onto Josh, and tightened ever more. They aren't going to listen to you even if you tried to get them back under your influence. You're not really trying to, anyway, content just to watch this play out.

" _Chris, quit it._ " He urges, bringing his own hands up to bat yours away, annoyed with just the right amount of desperation, indicating this is not right, and not something Josh feels comfortable with at the moment. And why would he, when those alien hands resist his efforts and squeeze tight and now Josh has made his transition fully into afraid, his eyes widening and hands pawing to get them off of him. " _Hey, st-stop, what . . . are you d-oing . . ._ "

Each word he gets out is quieter than the last but requires more effort to push out. The grip your hands are making gets impossibly tight. He kicks and fights, but he's always been smaller and weaker than you despite being older. Looking into Josh's eyes, you think you've found the definition of terror.

You realize you must be making a scary face because his reaction is fitting to one. It's as if he no longer recognizes the person above him. Despite that, he tries pathetically to call out to you again, lurching with a particularly hard squeeze that has his eyes close tight against the pain and fear.

" _Chri-_ " The strained plead breaks into a wheeze, lips trying to form more words with the lost breath escaping Josh at an alarming rate. It's just as it should be.

Panicked grey-green eyes dart back and forth, tears glittering in that familiar blue laptop light, the light back from when things were all rainbows and butterflies and you laugh at the hilarity and Josh is crying, streams now making their way down his cheeks.

His heartbeat throbs hard against your palms, made quick again by circumstance but inching closer to a slow, faint nothingness that those hands seem to crave.

All you can think as you watch your best friend fade out beneath you, just like you would watch a movie on the screen of your laptop, is that someone is killing the monster before he ever gets the chance to reign havoc on unsuspecting civilians.

And the sick thing is, you feel proud of yourself.

 

* * *

 

Chris jolts awake, sucking in breath like he'd gone without it for years.

Despite his immediate alarm, he is paralyzed, needing the time to come back to himself and recover from the dream. He is panting, chest rising and falling and eyes wide and troubled, stomach twisting and turning and feeling enough nausea that it was likely he may throw up.

Ever since that night on the mountain, nightmares weren't an unfamiliar occurrence for him, not in the slightest. However, his dreams were usually tortured by images of the wendigos and the Psycho. These were the things he has come to expect. In fact, he can't even remember the last time he's dreamt about anything _other_ than the mountain, and since most of his nightmares were recurring, he didn't think his subconscious mind had the capacity for what was, for lack of a better term, original thought. Needless to say, he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it at all. Wendigos are a walk in the park compared to this shit.

Some new kind of anxiety, and Chris previously had been confident he was attuned to every kind, is beginning to curl its way into his gut and consume him from the inside out. _When the fuck was he gonna catch a fucking break?_

All of the sudden, light bursts throughout the room and Chris is startled all over again, a hitch in his breath. He squints against the harsh change of brightness, blocking the light from his eyes by tucking them into the crook of his arm on instinct, curling in on himself. 

"Chris?" A voice calls to him, groggy and deep from sleep but noticeably worries. He relaxes slightly at the sound of this voice, the smell of this room, the ambiance, finally reminded of where he is. "Are you okay?"

Slowly, Chris lifts his arm from his eyes, cracking them open and painfully adjusting to yellow lamplight coming from the nightstand opposite to him. He sits up, and looks over to the source of the smooth and sleepy voice.

Josh is sitting on his side of the bed, several feet away, knees drawn up and ready to take action if need be, whether that means rushing to comfort him or running out of the room and taking refuge on the couch. Both of these were common alternatives to this pressing issue, the issue of nightly terrors. Josh's eyes are dark and concerned, assessing Chris with practiced ease. It shouldn't have to be this way. They both know this. They also both can't stop it.

But the worst part, by far, is the fact that Josh's left hand is covering one side of his face dutifully, like it belongs there, shielding the blonde from any unwelcome reminders of what he is guessing had been the haunt of Chris' sleep. Chris' stomach drops, the tragedy of it all hitting him like a ton of bricks, his own thoughts and feelings overwhelming him and Josh has no idea how fucked he is.

Tears spring to his eyes, guilt and fear swarming his mind, and he reaches for Josh's wrist, pulling his hand away with a determined fervor. Josh is immediately self-conscious, just like always when it came to his scars. The mangled side of his face is pointing down in a confused frown, unsure. Josh knows how vividly his condition reminds Chris of all the worst parts, and how particularly sensitive he is at times like these.

Chris knows he knows. He understands now with terrible clarity that he is making Josh suffer from something he has no control over. _Why did they have to be so fucked?_  Chris is having a hard time dealing with this torrent of bad, bad things, and, as he finally meets Josh's eyes, he suddenly can't hold it anymore. His face breaks in half with a sob, pitiful and unabashed, making Josh all the more worried, hover-handing awkwardly, trying to figure out what he should do.

All at once, Chris lurches himself forward into Josh's smaller chest, muttering muffled apologies and pleads for forgiveness. He ends up burying himself into the other boy just to reassure himself of his existence, of his validity, of his heart beat steady and strong against his throat and never to be taken away by the monstrosities on the mountain or by his own pale hands.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" Came a gentle prompt from Josh, not pushing or pulling in any direction, simply asking because he usually knew the answer but for some reason this time felt different.

Chris sighed shakily against him, not ready to face it but aware of the alternative. He sucked in a stabilizing breath.

This was something he had to hurdle.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here.](https://intrepidem.tumblr.com/)


End file.
